Innholdsfortegnelse for February 19, 2024 i India Today

The psychological hold Prime Minister Narendra Modi has on the Indian electorate is phenomenal. A full decade after he strode on to the national stage, he still walks like a colossus. In February 2024, a bare two months before the general election, an overwhelming 54.9 per cent endorse Modi’s name when asked for the person best suited to be India’s prime minister—a 2.6 percentage point rise over the 52.3 per cent he clocked in August 2023. And 60.5 per cent rate his prime ministerial performance as good or outstanding. A minor dip of 2.2 percentage points over August but, considering he is in the final year of his second term, more a high benchmark of inner buoyancy than anything else. The INDIA TODAY-CVoter Mood of the Nation (MOTN) survey has…

↘ The century-old heritage structure of the Osmania General Hospital in Hyderabad faces demolition as part of the plan to expand facilities at the government institute ↘ The previous BRS regime had endorsed this plan even as the Congress had pledged to protect and preserve the historic landmark ↘ But now, the new Congress regime seems to have backtracked on its promise while pushing for the expansion project before the high court, which is hearing a batch of writ petitions on the issue…

Nitish Kumar may have been Bihar chief minister from 2015, but the state has seen seven deputy CMs since. Some say the post itself is jinxed; others think they know where the problem lies—5, Deshratna Marg, the official residence of the deputy CM. RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav inaugurated it in 2016, only to have his wicket fall by July 2017. The BJP’s Sushil Modi, who succeeded Yadav, moved in in February 2019. A year later, the BJP and Nitish were still together, but Sushil was no longer part of the picture. The next two residents—Tarkishore Prasad (BJP) and Tejashwi—also saw their stay cut short when Nitish switched sides in 2022 and 2024. Now, with a new JD(U)-BJP regime in place, it remains to be seen which of the two new…

Such is the rush to join the BJP in Gujarat that the party has now formed a dedicated panel to review new inductees. Since the beginning of the year, thousands of supporters of two sitting MLAs—AAP’s Bhupendra Bhayani and Chirag Patel of the Congress—have joined the BJP along with the leaders. Another Congress MLA, C.J. Chavda, has quit and is expected to join soon. The six-member panel says it will review the antecedents of those joining to filter out “malfeasant elements”. Since 2017, over three dozen sitting MLAs and MPs of the Congress have jumped ship.…

The INDIA TODAY Mood of the Nation (MOTN) poll was conducted by CVoter, a globally renowned name in the field of socio-economic research, between December 15, 2023, and January 28, 2024, interviewing 35,801 respondents covering all Lok Sabha segments across all states. In addition to these samples, 113,081 interviews from CVoter’s regular tracker data between August 15, 2023, and January 31, 2024, were also analysed for the long-term trendline in calculating vote share and seat projections. Thus, the opinion of a total of 149,092 respondents was considered for this MOTN report. The margin of error is +/-3 per cent at the macro level and +/-5 per cent at the micro level of reporting, with 95 per cent confidence level. From May 2009 onwards, the CVoter Tracker has been carried out…

1 NAVEEN PATNAIK Odisha 52.7 [61.3] 2. YOGI ADITYANATH Uttar Pradesh 51.3 [46.9] 3. HIMANTA BISWA SARMA Assam 48.6 [49.2] 4. BHUPENDRABHAI PATEL Gujarat 42.6 [55.3] 5. MANIK SAHA Tripura 41.4 [34.9] 6. PRAMOD SAWANT Goa 41.1 [44.4] 7. PUSHKAR SINGH DHAMI Uttarakhand 40.1 [46.5] 8. ARVIND KEJRIWAL Delhi 36.5 [57.7] 9. M.K. STALIN Tamil Nadu 35.8 [48.3] 10. MAMATA BANERJEE West Bengal 32.8 [32] All figures in %; Feb. ’24 figures in bold, Aug. ’23 in [] Note: Respondents of every state were asked to evaluate the performance of their own CM. For instance, 52.7% respondents of the total of 3,760 from Odisha said they were satisfied with Naveen Patnaik, while 51.3% of the 6,703 respondents from UP expressed satisfaction with Yogi Adityanath’s performance.…

“It’s A TIHAAI!” QUIPS TABLA MAESTRO Padma Shri Zakir Hussain on being congratulated just a day after the triple whammy at the Grammy Awards. Just a month short of his 73rd birthday, he made history at the ceremony in Los Angeles, becoming the first Indian to win three of these trophies in a single night—in the Best Global Music Performance, Best Contemporary Instrumental Album and Best Global Music Album categories. Hussain now has five of these awards in all, equalling the tallies of the late sitar maestro Ravi Shankar and the master conductor Zubin Mehta; they are all in top spot, incidentally, on the list of Indians with the most Grammy wins. “It is all about love, all about harmony, all about diverse sounds coming together as one,” says Hussain. “The…

Q. You rocked the stage at Lollapalooza. What was the experience like? I am well aware of the high standards that Indian audiences have—especially live audiences, and there was a lot of anxiety. But I also know Indians like to have a good time and I had been prepared by my wife (actor Priyanka Chopra) to just have fun. That is all I did. The way the audience cheered for me was a reflection of how much warmth you guys have. Q. Did Priyanka convince you to perform in India? Indian culture is so rich in terms of the variety of songs, languages, tunes and what not. Priyanka herself is also a really talented singer. She was constantly telling me, ‘You’d better rock it’ or ‘You’d better rehearse’ and all of…

An hour-long dance recital, choreographed by the renowned Aruna Mohanty. Even if the Biswa Odia Bhasa Sammilani was supposed to be about verbal language, it could not have asked for a more eloquent piece of self-expression. The gestural language of Odissi, thus, came to body forth the spirit of the first World Odia Language Conference, inaugurated by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik in Bhubaneswar on February 3. It served as a testament to the resilience of the Odia people, depicting their ability to spring back—grace intact—from every challenge history threw at them. Throughout the three-day conference at the state capital’s Janata Maidan, a recurring theme emerged: Odisha and its people have repeatedly risen like a phoenix from adversity, drawing strength from their language and culture—whether facing the might of British rule,…

It’s an hour of reckoning for financial services firm Paytm, often touted as the poster boy of India’s digital payments revolution. On January 31, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) asked Paytm Payments Bank Limited (PBPL) to stop new credit and deposit operations, top-ups, fund transfers and all other banking operations by February 29. Customers will only be allowed to withdraw their balances from their accounts with PBPL. Paytm’s payment bank hosts over 330 million wallet accounts, says financial advisory firm Macquarie. The RBI order means even existing Paytm customers cannot carry out basic banking operations like credit, deposits, fund transfers, UPI transactions, bill payments, user wallets and FASTag payments, the last a space where Paytm has nearly 17 per cent market share and some 60 million users. For FY23,…

Akhilesh Yadav’s wife Dimple Yadav may have lost the election from the Kannauj Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh in 2019, but the constituency is still considered a Samajwadi Party (SP) stronghold. There is now talk that the SP chief himself might contest from here. But the ex-CM will not have it easy. On February 3, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath kickstarted the UP poll campaign from Kannauj with a big rally. He also laid the foundation stone for development schemes worth Rs 352 crore. Akhilesh has his task cut out: competing with the BJP’s largesse.…

When Narendra Modi stood up to address the Lok Sabha on February 5, the prime minister exuded an aura of confidence and assuredness. He even mocked the members seated in the Opposition benches, saying they would be occupying those seats for decades. He asserted that in the upcoming general election, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will win 370 seats on its own, 98 more than the 272 needed for a simple majority in the Lok Sabha. He put the overall tally of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) at an astounding 405 seats. With a flourish, he said, “Ab ki baar…” And, as he paused, BJP members in the House filled in the rest, “Char sau paar”. And so the target of 400 seats was set. That’s an electoral feat…

In February this year, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath achieved a new milestone, although in the virtual world. With 27.4 million followers on X (formerly Twitter), he emerged as the third most followed Indian politician after Prime Minister Narendra Modi (95.2 million) and Union home minister Amit Shah (34.4 million). However, his popularity is not restricted to social media. For eight times in a row in the INDIA TODAY Mood of the Nation (MOTN) poll, respondents across the country have rated Adityanath as the best among the 30 chief ministers. And there is a consistent spike in his popularity—46.3 per cent of the respondents now view him as the best CM compared to 43 per cent who held the same opinion in August 2023. What makes his position even stronger…

The king’s reign is over and the Badshah returns to reclaim the throne after 12 years. Amitabh Bachchan, long an invincible force in INDIA TODAY’s Mood of the Nation poll, was replaced by 2023’s entertainer of the year—Shah Rukh Khan. Pathaan, SRK’s first release in four years, became the first Hindi film to make Rs 500 crore-plus domestically. Seven months later, he beat his own record, with home production Jawan grossing Rs 554 crore in India alone, becoming the highest-grossing Hindi film of all time. Both films amassed Rs 1,000 crore worldwide, underlining Khan’s global appeal too. But come Christmas, SRK fatigue seemed to have set in as Dunki failed to replicate the blockbuster success of SRK’s other releases in 2023 though it still raked in a creditable Rs 200…

Despite the ubiquity of music in Indian life, and a rich heritage of music in drama, contemporary Indian theatre has staged few home-grown musicals; even fewer with an English libretto. Among those very few was Lillete Dubey’s 1990s production of Sandeep Kanjilal’s retelling of the Mahabharata, Jaya! The Victory! It ran for 40 shows before it closed. And in the months of putting it together, “I must have aged two years,” says Dubey over the phone, on the way to rehearsals of her current production of… the same play. Bringing Jaya back isn’t a recent impulse, she says; she had got permission from Kanjilal’s daughters as far back as 2013, and plans to do it in 2016 (Primetime Theatre’s 25th anniversary) and 2021 had had to be shelved. This revival…

Unlike fiction or poetry (which Indians love to compose though it gets little coverage), our original drama in English has lain in the doldrums for several years. The spark that Mahesh Dattani’s 1950s-born generation ignited in the last two decades of the 20th century seems to have been snuffed out. Manjula Padmanabhan completed her last full-length play in 2015. Dattani’s output has decreased since he grew more involved in screen work. Only Gowri Ramnarayan continues regularly with her lyrical classical-based scripts. Among younger dramatists, Abhishek Majumdar has attracted attention for the conservative backlash provoked by his political activism. Against this backdrop, we consider the new book by Cyrus Mistry, born in 1956, brother of the famed Rohinton. It collects three long plays, each separated by roughly 20 years. Doongaji House…

Telangana chief minister A. Revanth Reddy has decided that the state code will henceforth be ‘TG’ and not ‘TS’, as his predecessor, K. Chandra shekar Rao, had fixed. All vehicle registrations will, therefore, now change. As will the state emblem and statues of Telangana Talli (mother of Telangana) that have mushroomed across the state. Poet Ande Sri’s Jaya Jaya He Telangana is also set to become the state song. Looks like the Congress regime is determined to create a kotha (new) Telangana by the time the general election rolls in.…

Summer brings with it the perennial question: Where to go for the holidays? Opting for Tamil Nadu as your summer destination is the perfect time to escape the heat of the plains and head to the sylvan hill tracts of the State. While you may have been to some of the bigger and most popular destinations like Doty, Coonoor and Kodaikanal, they can get rather busy at this time of year. Why not head to one of the lesser-visited but equally rewarding destinations of Tamil Nadu instead? They will sweep you off your feet with their relaxed, laidback vibe, scenic vistas, fresh mountain air and boutique stay options. POOMBARAI Lying a mere 20 kilometres from Kodaikanal, Poombarai village is a true lesser-known gem of Tamil Nadu. Set among terraced garlic…

1 YOGI ADITYANATH Uttar Pradesh 46.3 [43] 2. ARVIND KEJRIWAL Delhi 19.6 [19.1] 3. MAMATA BANERJEE West Bengal 8.4 [8.8] 4. M.K. STALIN Tamil Nadu 5.5 [5.6] 5. NAVEEN PATNAIK Odisha 2.5 [3] 6. SIDDARAMAIAH Karnataka 2.3 [1.4] 7. HIMANTA BISWA SARMA Assam 2 [2.2] 8. EKNATH SHINDE Maharashtra 1.9 [1] 9. PUSHKAR SINGH DHAMI Uttarakhand 0.5 [0.5] 10. BHUPENDRABHAI PATEL Gujarat 0.4 [0.4] All figures in %; rest, others & don’t know/can’t say; Feb. ’24 figures in bold, Aug. ’23 in [] Note: All respondents across all states were asked to rate the performance of the 30 chief ministers in India. The ratings are the perception of all respondents across India. So, 46.3% of the 35,801 respondents in the current MOTN survey rated Yogi Adityanath as India’s No. 1 CM…

Not since the glory days of Lata Mangeshkar has a voice become as dominant in playback singing as Arijit Singh’s today. A ballad isn’t deemed romantic if it doesn’t have the Singh cadence. To little surprise, then, the reclusive singer, who has consistently topped the charts of music streaming apps as India’s most popular artist, was also the number 1 singer for the respondents in INDIA TODAY’s Mood of the Nation (MOTN) poll. Singh remains a favourite of composers like Pritam and Vishal-Shekhar who rely on his vocal talent. Such is its impact that his old tracks find resonance even today as evident in 2022’s ‘Kesariya’ which continues to be an earworm. That Singh is sought-after is well-known, but it’s the sheer volume of his hits in 2023 that demonstrate…